Slashdot Mirror
Having Your ID Stolen Leads to Job Loss, Prosecution
ConfusedVorlon writes "The BBC reports on the sad case of Simon Bunce. Mr. Bunce had his identity stolen, and credit cards were made to capitalize on the theft. Some of those cards were used at sites offering child pornography, and as a result Mr. Bunce was swept up in Operation Ore. The poor man was prosecuted for his 'crime', and was eventually found innocent, but in the meantime he lost his job. It took him six months to find another at a quarter of the salary. 'The police's computer technicians take several months to examine [his computers and records], and Mr Bunce could not afford to wait to repair the damage done to his reputation. "I knew there'd been a fundamental mistake made and so I had to investigate it." Recent surveys suggest that as many as one in four Britons have been affected by it. In 2007 more than 185,000 cases of identity theft were identified by Cifas, the UK's fraud prevention service, an increase of almost 8% on 2006.'"
From the Democratic Underground:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3100544
"You're fired!"
Those are the words that millions of Americans could hear if Congress passes the SAVE Act.
The SAVE Act would require every employer in the U.S. to use so-called "electronic employment verification," cross-checking all current and potential employees' citizenship status against databases that the government itself knows are filled with errors and inaccuracies.
And what if the Social Security Administration (SSA) or Department of Homeland Security (DHS) get it wrong and can't verify a person's citizenship or right to work using their buggy database? Tough luck. That person is out of a job, with no right to appeal. And you don't even need to have your identity stolen to be so unlucky.
Does this idea bother you?
uR iGn0ranc3, Their Power
> First off, in UK there is no presumption of innocence.
"Innocent until proven guilty" isn't even found in the US Constitution, it's simply assumed as a part of the Common Law, otherwise known as English Common Law. It is, however, explicitly in the EU Constitution.
But of course, the word "children" has been the magic word to dispel it.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
A little background. Landslide was the company that sold the AVS and KEYZ age verification codes for access to adult sites. Despite the fact that they had thousands of sites, and their lawyers assured them they were not responsible for content, the government shut them down and prosecuted them over a couple of dodgy offshore sites, claiming the owners were "madams of a child porn bordello," and sent them to prison for life.
Not content with this, they then took Landslide's entire customer list, sorted it by country, and sent it out to foreign law enforcement organizations demanding they raid everyone on it. They couldn't prove anyone on it had even visited an alleged child porn site, or what they had looked at if they did, but they could use the list for "probable cause" to search the victims computers, and if they found illegal porn while doing do, they could prosecute them for that.
Most countries ignored the US demands, except for those conducting their own child abuse moral panics like the UK. The UK ran with the list, and called its version "Operation Ore."
So they ran around raiding everyone in the UK who had purchased an age verification code from Landslide, and managed to find porn on a few computers, and sometimes were able to terrorize people on the list into making incriminating admissions. Of course, everyone so targeted was featured in the UK press as "a person who had paid for access to child porn."
The problem here is not identity theft. The problem here is a fishing expedition into the lives of mostly innocent people based on something which no reasonable person would consider probable cause.